Comment by zbentley

You absolutely can do that. Very easily in fact: https://blog.ttulka.com/building-container-images-without-do...

And for most people, that's a bad idea. Most people don't have to know what RPATH, ldd, multiversion/simlink library discovery, etc are. And even if they did, Dockerfiles give you an easy way to do something you couldn't easily do before: multi-stage builds and a highly robust way to say "drop the parts of my transitive hull that were only relevant at build time". Dockerfile semantics kind of descend naturally from needing the behavior of stages, parallelization, cache keying for image layers, semantic layering (FROM), and making simple use-cases relatively at-a-glance/contained.